


Years in Colours

by orphan_account



Series: ficlets and one shots [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Coming Out, Hair Dyeing, Humor, M/M, One Shot, POV Victor Nikiforov, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 21:56:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13257408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Victor was sixteen when the idea first occurred to him. He put the burden of blame on Howl and his moving castle and bath full of colours. He spent days, weeks, month pouring over hair colour catalogues and searching, searching, searching for the perfect dye. One that wouldn’t make the alabaster of his skin look washed out and the blue of his eyes, out-of-place. There was only a thin line between tastelessly tacky and wonderfully whimsical, after all.





	Years in Colours

**Author's Note:**

> tiny little ficlet in honour of finally dyeing my hair purple!

Victor was sixteen when the idea first occurred to him. He put the burden of blame on Howl and his moving castle and bath full of colours. He spent days, weeks, month pouring over hair colour catalogues and searching, searching, searching for the perfect dye. One that wouldn’t make the alabaster of his skin look washed out and the blue of his eyes, out-of-place. There was only a thin line between tastelessly tacky and wonderfully whimsical, after all.

It took him two months to settle on a light purple. 'Periwinkle blue' he heard the stylist call it. He liked how the word traveled in his mouth and smiled that bright, signature smile of his, one that faltered slightly when he saw the result. He was back not a week later, asking the stylist to reverse it and shamelessly lying about it being _entirely_ Yakov’s decision.

"Trouble with Lilia, no doubt. The poor old man is getting grumpier by the minute," the stylist offered sympathetically at Victor’s feigned sorrow. "Would you like to try something else then? Since you don’t even have to bleach your hair it won’t be much trouble," she rambled on and Victor couldn’t help but lean slightly forward in barely-controlled glee.

"Won’t it damage my hair?" He asked after consideration, stroking the ends of his smooth strands as if he was petting a frightened puppy.

"It usually does, but not a lot with the right care." That was all the assurance Victor needed. He chose a prominent blue this time, with lighter shades of highlights. This one, he sported until his next competition, and came back right after to try a subtle green. "Trying to go through the entire rainbow, huh?" The hairstylist said laughingly while mixing some chemicals. _'Rainbow,'_ he thought, 'how befitting!'

Victor was eighteen when Mika’s debut album came out. Interestingly enough, it was the same year he did, and to his surprise, no one was. "I thought I was less… obvious," he said petulantly. It didn’t really bother him that his family had already guessed. What bothered him was that he had thought about his talk with Yakov for days, and it took Yakov two seconds to pat him on the back and tell him to _get your ass back to practice, Vitya, and stop wasting both our time_.

Victor was nineteen and it had stopped bothering him, when a picture of him and _'his most recent fling'_ was posted on an online article. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the article. ' _Absolutely nothing,'_ he told himself and tried not to dwell too much on the way the words were stringed together like an insult in the connotation. That night he got piss-drunk over Yakov’s favourite bottle of vodka and sang along to Mika’s 'Grace Kelly' so loudly that his lungs hurt and enough times that he learned every word of the lyrics, every nuance of his accent. It helped that he was so good at mimicry. Mimicry helped most things, he supposed. _'I could be brown, I could be blue, I could be violet sky!'_ and it occurred to him in an epiphany, that he could. The next morning he woke up with his hair coloured in an unorganized assortment of blue and purple on a dye-stained couch cushion. To the loving warmth of Yakov’s most disappointed glare mixed with something that still surprised him to this day when he saw it in his coach; sympathy.

Victor was twenty and was selling his sexuality like a brand. He didn’t mind it for the most part. But then people were coming up to him, lovely people, telling him things he absolutely didn’t deserve to hear. Victor wasn’t brave for what he did, and he certainly hadn’t done it for the right reasons. Yet he read their letters about how they had come out to their friends and families and the reaction they’d received, which was a wide spectrum of colours with 'being kicked out' and 'tearful understanding' sitting comfortably where 'red' and 'purple' should be. Victor cried with them, laughed with them and felt like an absolute fucking fraud.

Victor was twenty-two when he woke up as heavy as lead. His phone rang and his poodle yipped and getting up to attend to both was harder than it ever should’ve been. He noticed that everything seemed excruciatingly dull. The realization went through him like a lightening bolt. He answered his phone and said "hi." What he wanted to say was "I’m in trouble." He started keeping count of how many days he woke up like that. There was a white board on his fridge, on which he drew a table with one column labeled as 'bored' and the other 'not bored.' He wiped it clean when one side started outweighing the other by more days that he was comfortable to admit.

Victor was twenty-four and a curtain of fog was blurring his vision and sitting at the edge of his nerves. His food tasted the same with less spices and his sleep schedule fluctuated between insomniac nights when he could only shut his eyes for half an hour and unfairly long days when he could barely get himself out of bed. He lived comfortably in a grotesque state of listlessness. He noticed it again, one day on the ice, taking the first position of his free skate. The curve of his hand didn’t feel like it belonged to him. It felt like a picture. Almost everything did. Blurry at the edges and faded colours. Olympics was near, so as far as his coach and his sponsors were concerned, only three of them mattered anyway. Red, blue, and white. And as far as he was, only one.

 _Gold_.

Victor was twenty-six and he hated the colour. He hated how it glinted the first chance it got, demanding attention the way he once had with his walk and his hair and his talent. _Gold_ had stolen the spotlight from the man who was wearing it. It had stolen value from the sweat and tears he had shed trying to get to wear it. It had stolen something from Victor that he was scared he would never get back. And Victor hated it, he hated it, he hated it.

Until he was twenty-seven. And he saw it bubbling in the champagne of his flute, radiating from the glow of the chandelier, sitting in the flecks of someone’s big brown eyes. Victor always had a thing for big brown eyes. He followed it until it led him to the small town of Hasetsu, to the comfort of a family that treated him like their own, to the brightest smiles he’d ever smile and the warmest love he’d ever love and Victor sank in it to stop himself drowning because Yuuri was showing him all the colours he’d never seen before. From the mahogany of his eyes to the black of his hair, from the tan of his skin to the pink of his lips, from the purple gloom of his anxiety to the unrelenting green of his stubbornness. And then white, bright hot white when he returned the chaste kiss Victor had given him after his free skate in China. Victor loved him, he loved him, he loved him more fiercely than he’d ever let himself before until _gold_ was glinting around his right ring finger in the cold winter sunlight of Barcelona, it would follow Victor back to Hasetsu and all the way to Saint Petersburg. The gold that he once followed was now following him. And it would. Always and always and _always_.

Victor was twenty-eight when he returned home to three sets of boxes waiting to be unpacked. His, Yuuri’s, and one filled with countless boxes of hair dye.

_"Happy birthday, don’t be an idiot._

_-Yakov"_

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! pls tell this poor soul what you think (/^▽^)/ 
> 
> *leaves this here and pretends she didn't rewrite it 3196497 times*


End file.
